Individualised electrophysiological neural field models for the assessment of thalamocortical function in disorders of consciousness: A multicentre study.

Reduced corticothalamic integrity in disorders of consciousness is more pronounced in 203 UWS patients than in 270 MCS patients, captured by a corticothalamic neural field model fitted to high-density EEG.

• Why it matters: Distinguishing limited awareness in minimally conscious state from complete unawareness in unresponsive wakefulness syndrome remains difficult, limiting mechanistic assessment of thalamocortical function.
• What they did: The study fitted a biophysically informed corticothalamic neural field model to high-density EEG from two independent multicentre datasets, then simulated per-subject EEG and compared empirical versus simulated complexity metrics.
• The result: The model reproduced spectral and complexity patterns, and permutation entropy emerged as a sensitive marker distinguishing MCS from UWS for both real and simulated time series.